Careers

Reimagine tomorrow with CommScope. If you are passionate about building innovative systems for a better world, we need you on our team. Our talent is comprised of professionals with a wide range of experience who deliver unique solutions. Whether you’re an expert industry veteran or a new professional — your work will leave an impact. The future is powered by you. Join the CommScope team today.

The Human Brain Project and DCIM

Many people liken the data center to the “brain” of the corporate
network. At this moment, there is a huge
new technology project taking place in the European Union with monumental and
global implications – The Human Brain Project (HBP). The project is funded to the
tune of €1 billion and is expected to take 10 years to complete. Similar to the
Human Genome Project, the
ambitious objective of the HBP is to develop a full computer simulation of the
human brain.

Professor Henry Markram, director
of the HBP, describes the project as a way to understand what makes the human
brain unique, the basic mechanisms behind cognition and behavior, how to objectively
diagnose brain diseases and to build new technologies inspired by how the brain
computes.

The
challenges are many, but one key hurdle is the sheer volume of associated data
that already exists and continues to be generated as research scientists around
the world evaluate the brain using different techniques and publish their
findings in tens of thousands of neuroscience papers annually. Markram confirms that what they currently
lack today is a way to bring all of these perspectives together. The process is
too complex with just talking and writing papers; there is a need to create a
digital, graphical version of the data in order to integrate all this
information into one holistic view.

Which brings
me back to the data center and how familiar all this sounds to the challenges
faced by today’s data center managers. There
is a vast amount of data collected from the physical contents and configuration
of the data center from multiple sources with varied intentions and formats.
This is exacerbated by the “silos” that exist between the IT folks responsible
for the servers and other computing assets, and the facilities personnel responsible
for power, cooling, and other aspects of the data center. Getting people together face-to-face or
sharing disparate reports is inefficient and ineffective.

What’s the
good news? A “digital, graphical” model of the data center can now be created to
integrate all this information into one holistic view, and it doesn’t cost €1 billion. Namely, our iTRACS Data Center
Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software suite provides the data center manager
with an interactive 3D
visualization of the data center and all its interconnections, enabling
powerful analytics to drive business efficiency. iTRACS turns vast amounts of operational
data about the physical infrastructure – power, space, cooling, network
services– into meaningful, understandable information visualized in a navigable
model of the data center. This end-to-end model – with all of its dashboards,
reports, and analytics – turns guesswork into comprehensive, holistic knowledge
that can be shared and leveraged by everyone, collectively.

By
integrating all the available data into a powerful simulation, scientists with
the HBP project are working to enable a “Big Data” approach to medicine that may
lead to personalized drugs based on an individual patient’s symptoms, behaviors
and direct measurements. While the optimization goals of a DCIM solution are
far less grandiose and altruistic, they are likely no less important to those
who face these challenges on a daily basis.

What
are your thoughts on DCIM and how it can help manage the “brain” of your
business network?

About the Author

Simon Cowley

Simon C. Cowley is director of campus fiber market development
for CommScope.In this
role, he is responsible for developing unique and comprehensive solutions for
the office and campus workplace environment covering copper, fiber, wireless,
and power technologies. Simon previously led CommScope’s Enterprise Solutions
Global Technical Support team since 2006.He also served as director of apparatus R&D for copper, fiber, and
intelligent systems and fiber optic engineering manager since joining CommScope
in 2001. Before joining Commscope, he served in various
engineering, business development, and management capacities with Amphenol
Fiber Optics, ITT Cannon, and FCI/Berg Electronics. Simon is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute with an MBA in Global Management from the University of Phoenix.